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Vitalik Buterin recently updated the extension of the Ethereum roadmap. He went on to confirm that Sharding will still occupy an important part of the overall upgrade and that the roll-ups are already available.
Scalability has been identified as an issue with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum Ether. If a distributed ledger has to achieve adoption by FinTech companies and compete with networks 100 times faster it has to find a way to boost scalability and throughput while also addressing latency issues. This is where Sharding assumes importance.
In one of his recent tweets, Vitalik Buterin confirmed that sharding was not called-off. He added that the ultra-high scaling with sharding and roll-up functionalities can be commissioned in the first phase, but no exact date for when these implementations will happen have been clearly indicated. Ethereum has been under constant pressure to lighten up and scale its network now. The DeFi boom has taken a toll on the network driving up its average transaction fees up the moon. Dealing in the network has become expensive and the transactional speed is slipping down. In the present time, Ethereum is facing issues of extensibility and is unable to meet demands. In such cases, the 3rd party protocols are becoming essential to process data off the primary chain.
A snapshot of the tweet by the Co-founder is given below:
Source: Twitter
He continued by stating that phase 0 of the roadmap will also bring in a Proof Of Stake consensus which also is on the anvil. The dates are still unclear. Phased 0 is also known as the beacon chain will not introduce anything related to scaling as it is a part of Phase 1. Buterin took into account the current progress of the work on the network and said that as of now and based on the till-date development, Buterin said that it can now handle 15-45 transactions per second although the interval is stretched far. The rollups are already in operation and this is stated to increase by 100x. On the other hand, sharding with side-chains will get it to increase by 64x. If these two are combined, the speeds can be pushed up in theory by 6400x. This has to be seen but theoretically speaking it is possible.
He supplemented all this with additional information saying that sharded rollups only have to be released with Phase 1 because rollups make use of the chain only for data purposes and not for computation. He was positive that for 6400x throughput, all the needed tools are there.
He further added that rollups are already present for high-speed transactions. Last week he suggested that Ethereum should be used for payments with its Layer-2 operations which already exist. It was Matter Labs that launched L2 gateway zkSynch on the mainnet in mid-June this year. This is much touted as it activates PayPal-scale throughput for dapps or wallets. The plasma scaling for Ethereum had integrated the Tether stablecoin in August to facilitate cost-efficient payments.